Hubert Meeus - Antwerp as a center of religious book production from 1481 till the end of the seventeenth century

Course description ∙ The first book printed in Antwerp was Simon van Venlo’s Boexken van der officien ofte dienst der missen (1481), a book explaining the catholic mass. From then until the end of the hand-press period Antwerp remained a center for the production of religious books in all shapes and kinds not only for the Low Countries but for the whole world. In my lecture I will treat the evolution and diversity of religious printing in Antwerp from Reformation to Counter Reformation.

Recommended reading​: Paul Arblaster, A history of the low countries. Basingstoke:  Palgrave MacMillan, 2012. (2006 1 st ed.)

  • Chapter: The Low Countries United and Divided, 1384-1609
  • Chapter: From Delftware to Porcelain, 1609-1780

Prof. dr. Hubert Meeus is a professor at the Department of Literature and the ISLN (Instituut voor de Studie van de Letterkunde in de Nederlanden) at the University of Antwerp. His subjects of research are literature and theatre in the Low Countries during the sixteenth and seventeenth century and the history of the printed book from its invention till 1800.

David McKitterick - Looking at rare books

Course description ∙ There are almost innumerable ways of looking at books quite apart from reading them. Using materials from the fifteenth century onwards, this class will consider how different physical aspects of books can guide us towards a better understanding of their purposes, their manufacture and marketing, their reception by readers, and the ever-changing values set on them generation by generation.

Recommended reading​: D.F.McKenzie, 'History of the book,' in Peter Davison (ed.), The book encompassed; studies in twentieth-century bibliography (Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp.290-301.

Professor David McKitterick, emeritus Honorary Professor of Historical Bibliography in the University of Cambridge, was for many years Librarian of Trinity College, Cambridge. He has written extensively on libraries, collecting and book design. His books include the standard 3-volume A history of Cambridge University Press, a study of the long transition from manuscript to print, Print, Manuscript and the Search for Order, 1450-1830 (2003), and Old Books, New Technologies; the Representation, Conservation and Transformation of Books since 1700 (2013). His latest book, The Invention of Rare Books, is due to be published this summer.

Daniël Ermens - What is a manuscript?

Course description ∙ The manuscripts in our libraries have long histories. What happened to them in the centuries between their production and our present time is often unknown. If we are lucky some traces are left of previous owners and the way they dealt with these books, but often there are no traces, or they have been erased. Each change to a manuscript takes away a (little) part of the original book, and makes it more difficult for us to understand it. We can never bring back what has been lost, but a closer look at the materiality of a manuscript may help us to increase our understanding of that particular codex. In this session we will explore the materiality of manuscripts, using Peter Gumbert’s terminology for the constituting parts of a manuscript (i.e. codicological units). The question ‘What is a manuscript?’, however, will not be answered, but it will, hopefully, pop up in the minds of the participants whenever they consult a manuscript after this session.

Recommended reading​: J.P. Gumbert, ‘Codicological Units. Towards a Terminology for the Stratigraphy of the Non-Homogeneous Codex’, in: Segno e Testo 2 (2004), pp. 17-42. (only pp. 17-26)

​Dr. Daniël Ermens studied Germanic languages at the University of Antwerp, with a semester abroad at the University of Hull. He was one of the authors that compiled the seven volume Repertorium of Middle Dutch sermons (2008, University of Antwerp), and in 2015 he defended his PhD thesis on the users and functions of multi-text codices containing Middle Dutch texts at the University of Utrecht. His present research focusses on the codicological aspects of manuscripts with Middle Dutch texts, and the use of parchment in book bindings. He currently works as administrative assistant of the Ruusbroec Institute and as assistant curator of its special collections, and as project member of the academic heritage project of the University Library. He is also a qualified book binder specialised in parchment bindings.

Ann Kelders - Sounding heritage. Medieval and Renaissance Music Manuscripts from the Low Countries

Course description ∙ The collection of religious music manuscripts preserved in the Royal Library of Belgium is both large and diverse. This results from the long and complex history of the library with roots going back to the end of the fourteenth century. The Manuscripts Department, therefore, preserves luxurious choirbooks with polyphonic masses and motets destined to the Habsburg-Burgundian court, as well as antiphonaries and graduals belonging to religious houses until the end of the eighteenth century.  Also their physical condition is variant: books on parchment or paper, large or very small depending from their use and commissioners, codices and fragments. A partnership between the Royal Library and the Alamire Foundation. International Centre for the Study of Manuscripts in the Low Countries aims at the digitisation, study and valorisation of this musical heritage.

Dr. Ann Kelders is historian and scientific collaborator (assistant curator) at the Manuscripts Department of the Royal Library of Belgium. As research associate of the Alamire Foundation (KU Leuven – Research Group Musicology), she is involved in projects as to the Medieval and Renaissance music heritage of the Low Countries.

Nina Lamal - Handwritten or printed ephemera in the early modern period: why does it matter?

Course description ∙ Why does it matter whether a text is handwritten or printed? The impact of the invention of printing has caused a lot of debate. One thing scholars agree on is that manuscript texts did not simply disappear with the arrival of the printing press. But the two media are still studied separately from one another. Print and manuscript are still often presented and seen in simple oppositions, for instance printed material reaches a undefined wide public and manuscript is per definition a more private medium. In this session we will examine why we make these distinctions and whether they are useful by looking at both manuscript and printed media from the early modern period. We will explore the roles of manuscript and print and the complex nature of early modern ephemera and communication.

Recommended reading​

Dr. Nina Lamal is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Antwerp. She obtained her PhD at University of Leuven and University of St Andrews in 2014. Her thesis is a study of the Italian news report, political debates as well as histories on the Revolt in the Low Countries (1566-1648). From 2015 and 2017 she worked as a postdoctoral researcher for the Universal Short Title Catalogue project based at the University of St Andrews. She is currently finishing the first bibliography of Italian newspapers entitled Late with the news. Italian engagement with serial news publications in the seventeenth century 1639-1700, which will be published by Brill. Her present research project funded by Research Council Flanders focusses on the interaction between manuscript newsletters and printed newspapers in the seventeenth century.

 

Goran Proot - Technical, economic, and design aspects of books and ephemera produced with the handpress in the early modern period

Course description This session will focus on technical and practical aspects of relief printing with the handpress and the importance of formes and sheets for our understanding of the production of books and ephemera. For printers and booksellers, the printing sheet was a fundamental unit for production and to establish prices, as will be demonstrated using Paris and Antwerp examples from the period 1540–1655. Furthermore, it will be demonstrated how extensive bibliographical datasets (e.g., the Short Title Catalogue Flanders, www.stcv.be) holding sheet counts of editions can be used to distinguish different printers' profiles. To conclude, we will explore how design features of handpress books developed from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century in the Southern Netherlands.

Recommended reading​: Philip Gaskell, A new introduction to bibliography. New Castle (Delaware): Oak Knoll, 2012. 

Dr. Goran Proot obtained his Ph.D. in Language and Literature at the University of Antwerp with a thesis about Jesuit theater in the Southern Netherlands from the period 1575–1773. He has been director of the Short Title Catalogus Vlaanderen project (STCV), a major bibliographical project documenting all pre–1801 hand-press books published in Flanders. He is editor-in-chief of the book historical journal De Gulden Passer, and he is president of the Flanders Book Historical Society. He has worked as curator of rare books at Antwerp University Library (2003–2009). In 2012 he became Andrew W. Mellon Curator of Rare Books at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC. In 2014 he moved to the Bibliothèque Mazarine in Paris, where he directed the digital library and the conservation laboratory. On 1 November 2016, he joined the EMo Book Trade project funded by the ERC about the 16th-c. book trade under the direction of prof. dr. Angela Nuovo at the Università di Udine, Italy. During the coming years, he will survey book prices from the period 1555–1630 in the archives of Christopher Plantin and his successors at the Museum Plantin-Moretus in Antwerp, in addition to French, printed bookseller’s catalogues with printed prices. In addition, he surveys layout and design of pre–1801 handpress books.

Dirk Imhof - The Plantin Press and the production of ephemera for religious institutions

Course description: Usually the Antwerp Plantin Press is associated with the production of voluminous theological treatises and liturgical editions. These books, printed on paper of high quality and often illustrated with refined engravings, gave the Plantin-Moretus Press its reputation as publishers of luxurious and expensive editions. However, less known is that both Christopher Plantin and his successors, the Moretuses, also frequently printed indulgences, jubilees, announcements of religious festivities, prints for religious brotherhoods, etc. Although the profits from printing these texts may seem low, it allowed the Press to maintain their relations (and possible contracts) with ecclesiastical institutions. Unfortunately, only a limited number of these sheets are still preserved, but acquisitions in the 19th and 20th centuries included several examples of religious ephemeral publications.

Recommended reading: Dirk Imhof, 'Reliable texts attractively presented: the Plantin and Moretus publishing dynasty', in Museum Plantin Moretus Antwerp. (Gent: Snoeck Publishers, 2016).

Dr. Dirk Imhof is keeper of the rare books and archives of the Plantin-Moretus Museum. He has a masters in Classics and earned a doctorate in history at the University of Antwerp in 2008 with a thesis on the Antwerp publisher Jan Moretus I. Together with Karen Bowen he wrote Christopher Plantin and Engraved Book Illustrations in Sixteenth Century Europe (Cambridge, CUP, 2008). In 2014 his bibliography of the editions by Jan Moretus I was published: Jan Moretus and the Continuation of the Plantin Press. A Bibliography of the Works published and printed by Jan Moretus I in Antwerp (1589-1610) (Leiden, 2014).

Alexander Soetaert - Early Modern Printers and Universities: the case of Douai

Course description ∙ During the early modern period university towns were often also significant typographical centers. For instance, it has recently been indicated that in several German towns, including Wittenberg and Helmstedt, the presence of a university has fostered local book production. This session, however, will focus on the less-known university town of Douai, located in the French-speaking south of the Habsburg Low Countries. It will be demonstrated how the academic climate created a fertile environment for printers and booksellers. On the one hand, publishers issued many scholarly volumes by local professors, mostly written in Latin, that subsequently were circulated all over Europe. But on the other hand, they were also given many smaller printing assignments by the university’s faculties and colleges, most notably for thesis prints (thesenblätter). For Douai an exceptionally large collection of almost 700 of these broadsheets has been preserved, which contributes to a better understanding of the dynamics of Douai’s book production and the activities of the town’s several printing offices.

Recommended reading:

  • M. Walsby, ‘Cheap Print and the Academic Market: The Printing of Dissertations in Sixteenth-Century Louvain’, in A. Pettegree (ed.), Broadsheets. Single-Sheet Publishing in the First Age of Print (Leiden 2017) 355–375;
  • Alexander Soetaert, ‘Printing at the frontier. The emergence of a transregional book production in the Ecclesiastical Province of Cambrai (ca. 1560–1659)’, in De Gulden Passer 94 (2016) 137–163.

Dr. Alexander Soetaert studied early modern history at KU Leuven. He is currently doctor-assistant at the Early Modern History Research Group of KU Leuven. His PhD dissertation, defended in May 2017, dealt with the publication of Catholic literature and transregional exchange in the Ecclesiastical Province of Cambrai (the French-speaking regions of the Habsburg Low Countries) in the period 1559–1659. His current research focusses on the contribution of hagiographical editions to processes of community and identity building in the Habsburg Low Countries during the early seventeenth century.

Jan Van der Stock - Printing Ephemera in 16th Century Antwerp: the Shadow of the Image

Course description ∙  More information will follow soon

Recommended reading​: Jan Van der Stock, Printing Images in Antwerp. The Introduction of printmaking in a City. Fifteenth Centrury to 1585, (Studies in Prints and Printmaking, 2), Rotterdam, 1998

Prof. Dr. Jan Van der Stock is art historian and exhibition curator. He is a full professor at the University of Leuven, where he lectures on Medieval and Renaissance Arts, Graphic Arts, Iconography, Iconology, and Curatorship. He is the director of Illuminare – Centre for the Study of Medieval Art (KU Leuven) and holder of the Van der Weyden Chair – Paul & Dora Janssen, the Veronique Vandekerchove Chair of the City of Leuven and the Chair of Medieval Sculpture in the Low Countries.

 

 

Ann Diels and Eva Janssens - Religious prints from the Netherlands (2nd half of the 16th century) on the strategic chessboard

Course description More information will follow soon

Recommended reading

Prof. Dr. Ann Diels and Eva Janssens, MA

Tom Deneire - Digital Collections: Library Metadata and How to Use it for Research

Course description ∙ As Special Collections like handpress books, manuscripts, prints or ephemera are digitized at an ever increasing tempo and as more and more institutions open up the resulting data and metadata, researchers face a promising, but perhaps daunting prospect. There can be no doubt that open data inspire new and exciting research, but at the same time digital technologies are rapidly changing and not always easy to master. Therefore, this workshop offers a quick and dirty introduction into the world of open data, using two sets of library metadata: that of the University of Antwerp’s Print Room (ca. 1,500 engravings, etchings, lithos) and its Thijs Collection (ca. 1,100 devotional prints). It will discuss metadata basics (e.g. controled vocabularies), standards (e.g. Dublin Core) and formats (e.g. XML) and present concrete examples of how to use library metadata for digital humanities research.

Recommended reading​: Matthew Kirschenbaum – Sarah Werner, ‘Digital Scholarship and Digital Studies: The State of the Discipline’, in Book History 17 (2014), 406-455

Dr. Tom Deneire studied Classics and obtained a PhD in Neo-Latin Literature from K.U.Leuven with a dissertation on Justus Lipsius (1547–1606). As a postdoctoral researcher for NWO at the Huygens ING Institute (The Hague) he studied the dynamic interplay of Latin and vernacular poetry in the Dutch Golden Age. The results of this project were published in T. Deneire (ed.), Dynamics of Neo-Latin and the Vernacular: Language and Poetics, Translation and Transfer (Leiden: Brill, 2014). In 2013 he was appointed Curator of the Special Collections of the University of Antwerp Library, an officially acknowledged heritage library that goes back to a Jesuit school library and also holds a Print Room. As a curator he mainly supervises registration and digitization projects. His current research interests include Early Modern book history, Neo-Latin and digital humanities. He is editor of the book historical journal De Gulden Passer and the open access journal Humanistica Lovaniensia.

Tine Van Osselaer e.a. - On the importance of ephemeral prints in the study of stigmatics, c.1800-1950

Course description ∙ How do you study religious enthusiasm? Though much has been made of bottom-up approaches to answer this question, the consequences on the types of sources and historical method have rarely been made explicit. This course addresses these consequences for the study of modern religiosity—more in particular the devotion and promotion of stigmatics (women and men who claimed to carry the wounds of Christ). The former lack of interest in ephemera was in large part due to the sources themselves: sources for popular devotion are often cheap, mass-produced ephemera that were not considered worthy of preservation. Equally, however, this was due to the historian’s training, which stayed within classical methodological frameworks. Departing from these frameworks, the STIGMATICS team traced traditionally undervalued sources by going off the beaten tracks. In this course we make the case for going on archival adventures. We show how the documentary wealth found in these terrae incognitae, and promote its essential new insights in the study of religious enthusiasm.

Recommended reading​: -

The STIGMATICS-team consists of four historians specialized in contemporary history—Tine Van Osselaer (research professor), Andrea Graus (post-doctoral researcher), Leonardo Rossi (Ph.D. student) and Kristof Smeyers (Ph.D. student)—who study the devotion and promotion of stigmata and their alleged bearers in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe. To understand this phenomenon as a manifestation of popular, ‘lived’ religion, they are assembling a wide range of overlooked sources, including ephemeral prints.

Steven Van Impe - Liturgical ephemera from the 17th to the 20th century

Course description ∙ Many research libraries and archives have considerable holdings of ephemeral publications, and consider them to be of great cultural, if not financial, value. However, collecting ephemera, and providing them with meaningful metadata, is no trivial task. By their nature, ephemera are never meant to be catalogued and preserved. Understandig how librarians deal with these difficulties may help researchers find the materials they need. A small case study based on liturgical ephemera from the 18th and 19th centuries will help make this clear.

Recommended reading​: Steven Van Impe, 'The Special Collections of the Hendrik Conscience Heritage Library (Anterp), result of a long history', in Archief- en Bibliotheekwezen België 2013, 129-141.

Steven Van Impe, M.A. is curator of old books and manuscripts at the Hendrik Conscience Library in Antwerp. He holds a master in History (Ghent University) and a post-graduate in Library and Information Science (Antwerp University). He worked as a bibliographer on the Short Title Catalogus Vlaanderen (STCV) before becoming a curator at the Hendrik Conscience Library in 2007. In his spare time he is working on a PhD on newspapers in Antwerp in the 18th century. He has published on the history of printing in the Southern Low Countries in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

David McKitterick - Enlightenment, revolution and romanticism. A bibliographical earthquake and its aftershocks in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries

Course description ∙ What happened to how books were studied and valued between the middle of the eighteenth century and the middle of the nineteenth? What kind of evidence can we use to help us understand the extraordinary changes that took place, with the French revolution and the subsequent wars lying chronologically as well as practically in the centre of this critical transition that still affects our attitudes today?

Recommended reading​: -

Professor David McKitterick, emeritus Honorary Professor of Historical Bibliography in the University of Cambridge, was for many years Librarian of Trinity College, Cambridge. He has written extensively on libraries, collecting and book design. His books include the standard 3-volume A history of Cambridge University Press, a study of the long transition from manuscript to print, Print, Manuscript and the Search for Order, 1450-1830 (2003), and Old Books, New Technologies; the Representation, Conservation and Transformation of Books since 1700 (2013). His latest book, The Invention of Rare Books, is due to be published this summer.

Venues